By H.P. LovecraftEdited by S.T. Joshi

Dust Jacket Text

IN 1913, a reclusive young man from
Providence, Rhode Island, wrote a letter to The Argosy magazine.
“I may with safety predict that no part of this . . . will appear in
print,” the correspondent concluded. But the young man was wrong: not
only was his letter published, but a resultant invitation to join the United
Amateur Press Association would forever alter the life of one Howard Phillips
Lovecraft.

Although Lovecraft today is considered the most significant
American horror writer between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King, the
astonishing range of his auctorial endeavors is documented for the first
time in this volume, from surviving juvenilia through his aforementioned
entree into the world of amateur journalism to a letter written during the
final weeks of his life. Literary criticism and philosophical
speculation, political jeremiads and inimitably eccentric
travelogues – some of this material is of occasional interest, but much of
the remainder is absolutely essential for a proper appreciation of
Lovecraft the fantasist.

“Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” remains Lovecraft’s central
statement in illuminating his own creative aesthetic, while his
commonplace book – aphoristic entries from the literary sorcerer’s personal
grimoire – is perhaps as close as we shall ever come to a real-life
Necronomicon. The sprightly peregrinations of an unregenerate
antiquarian through “His Majesty’s Colonies” are detailed in “Observations
on Several Parts of America,” while “Cats and Dogs” – a tour-de-force
fusion of metaphysics, politics, and aesthetics – is simply one of the
great American essays.

Most moving is that final 1937 to Nils H. Frome in which
Lovecraft, now aware that he is dying, strives nonetheless to disabuse his
young correspondent of spurious supernatural and occult delusions. Even
as a sojourner in Death’s waiting room, listening for the knock on the
door, H.P. Lovecraft remained faithful to his scientific beliefs, a
seeker-after-truth to the end.